Fireflies AI co-founder Sam Udotong recently admitted in a LinkedIn post that when the company launched in 2017, its AI-powered note-taking service charging $100 per month was actually just him and co-founder Krish Ramineni manually transcribing meetings by hand. The company made headlines this summer with a $1 billion valuation, boasting that 75 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use its services to transcribe corporate meetings.
In his LinkedIn post, Udotong explained that when customers booked meetings, the two founders would dial in as Fred from Fireflies.ai, sit silently, take detailed notes by hand, and send them 10 minutes later. The co-founders operated this way for over 100 meetings to collect the $750 monthly rent for a tiny San Francisco living room before deciding to automate everything in 2017. Company CEO Krish Ramineni later backtracked, stating the platform has operated with no human reviewers, no human in the loop, and no third-party labelling vendors from the beginning, which appears to contradict Udotong's original statement.
The incident highlights a prevalent practice in tech startups where companies sell services as AI products that are actually powered by humans – similar to Amazon Just Walk Out stores operated by sweatshop labourers in India or AI coding chatbots powered by ghost workers in Kenya. LinkedIn commenters raised privacy concerns and questioned the misleading business practices, whilst others cited the startup's successful growth as an example of how to validate ideas in the market.
Sources:
1. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/fireflies-founder-startup-ai
3. https://www.inc.com/tekendra-parmar/fireflies-not-really-ai/91265942
